Life Is Elsewhere (revisited)

Life Is Elsewhere (revisited)

Ah, what to do when you are between model shoots and don't wish to stop working on what you love? Re-editing old ones, of course :) This is turning into a regular custom of mine, and rather than once again pseudo-apologize for it, I will embrace it. There are some you get right, right the first time, and others, well, fall into the category of reach exceeding grasp. This was one of them. Done about 18 months ago, this image was inspired by an old movie poster of a film called "Being There," starring the late Peter Sellers, his final film.

The film poster was pure whimsy in a Magritte style - something I am and have been clearly drawn to since childhood. For those that see the similarities in my imagery and that of the surrealist master Rene Magritte, I am 100% on board with that - I have been influenced by his imagery before I even knew his name! There were three instances of imagery from him that I distinctly recall in my formative years, and I did not realize who Magritte was and that these images from my youth were from him! I just realized the connections last year. They were:

the film poster from this film, which my image is based on

the image "the Pleasure Principle" which I remember appearing in a science/science fiction magazine called Omni, in the 1980s.

There was the video for the song "Is There Something I Should Know?" by the band Duran Duran which featured a very Magritte-inspired middle section, complete with Bowler hats and symbolism.

And why the bowler hat man? What does it mean to me and my time and my world? Well, simply put, I do not care to represent the here and now in my imagery. Today's fashions and style I find lacking and hard to imbue with any mystique or symbolism. I like the art deco, Victorian/Edwardian period. The clothing, the iron work, the art deco, all of it. It is expensive to re-create. Often, I do not get what I want for props and costumes. But the timelessness, the throwback to a bygone era hopefully still comes through in my work.

Anyway, I decided to re-edit this old one, which generally people liked, because there were more than a few things I was dissatisfied with, even when I finished it. For one, my earlier pieces all suffered from scale issues - there is no reason why the model in the original should occupy the amount of the composition that he was. That needed to be addressed straight away. When someone is suspended in mid-air, you generally want to give them some breathing room in the frame! Secondly, not knowing what to put in the background, I decided on these weird towers which neither looked convincing as towers nor meant much in particular. They were there to fill space. The rest of the pieces of the original were homages to objects I had used in the past, sort of throwing everything into one image as an in-joke. Lastly, I suffered from an affliction which affects JJ Abrams as well: lens flare addiction! I see no reason to have this distracting flare, as I look at it now. Oh, and I really do not like the color scheme of the original. Oh, and the fruit? Why was the fruit there??

You might be thinking, "well, did you like anything about it? Why bother?" Sure - I liked the idea behind it. That alone made it worth doing again. This time, I got to change the scene to a more wintery one, and instead of an assembly of ladder that really didn't make much sense of have much of a solid footing symbolically in the piece, Now I have my man on a hill, rising over the foliage, the city vista way down below, and the ladders can only go so far, but the life he is trying to reach, the rarefied air, the unknown, is something that requires climbing in a whole different way. He is now rising up into the light, away from the earth, and this all makes a lot more cohesive sense to me!

The city vista is an older photograph I took in 2007 high on a hill looking down over San Francisco.

A side by side of the old version and the new version can be seen on my Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/MichaelBilottaPhotography

Model: Zack Barnes